“I’m doing a project on poetry in real life. Would you be willing to answer a question about what poetry means to you?” she asked.

“My answer doesn’t have to rhyme, does it?” I asked through a mouthful of food. She assured me that rhyming, nor iambic pentameter were required.

As she prepared the question I would have to answer, I became concerned – what question about poetry could I possibly answer in any meaningful way? My favorite poems are limerics … and I don’t think those even count as poems.

But when she finally presented the question, I knew the answer immediately.

“Who is a poet in your life?”

I know a handful of eloquent people, I think I even know a couple English majors. But there is only one poet in my life – someone who uses language in ways that surprise me, move me, and somehow capture the world in ways I never thought possible. Sonya.

One morning, some time ago, Mitali and I had been explaining the notion of words rhyming. Sonya seemed to get the idea and mulled it over for some time. Then, not long after, on our way to daycare she glanced down at her shirt and exclaimed, “Look Daddy! The colors on my shirt rhyme too!”

So much of what Sonya says is more than cute – it’s enlightening and broadening. Through her words she gives me new, fresh ways of seeing the world. And that, truly, is a poet’s gift.

Author’s note: Leena is on her way to being an explorer of English … but right now we’re more at the one-word command stage. Several days ago, Sonya said it well. We were debating whether Leena talks and Sonya informed me that “Leena doesn’t talk, Daddy – she makes the sounds things make.” In reality, I imagine that she sounds more or less the the way I sound to people in French – except that she’s two and I’m a full grown adult. Her vocabulary is quickly expanding, though. And, it would seem that she will soon become a poet in English and I will likely remain the Plateau village idiot…

Feeling a bit sheepish, I decided it best to follow their lead from here on out. Chewbacca-dog, Han Solo-cat, and I scampered down the hall, into the living room, and rushed past the sofa. Looking along the back of the couch I saw no fewer than 5 devices with a range of buttons and knobs on them. It only took me a moment to realize that we had, indeed, infiltrated the Death Star, and just in time! We spotted Princess Leah sitting on top of what appeared at first glance to be a disassembled stereo, but was, no doubt, some sort of Imperial interrogation machine. Her little fuzzy head lolled to one side in defeat. Solo-cat heroically retrieved her from the device just as we detected the presence of Darth Vader. I can’t quite say what tipped me off to his arrival – it could have been a disturbance in the Force or it could have been the opening to the Imperial March which arose quite suddenly from Solo-cat’s direction.

“BUM BUM BUM bum Bum BUM bum Bum BUM,” Han Solo-cat hummed grimly. Our eyes connected. “Darth Vader!” we both cried.

“Let’s get back to the ship!” I shouted. Han Solo-cat gallantly grabbed Princess Leah by her long reticulated neck and launched herself out of the room on pattering feet. I prepared to follow when I noticed that Chewbacca-dog was still toddling around the Death Star, clutching a furry, monkey-like Stormtrooper to her chest in a deadly Wookie embrace.

“Let’s go Chewbacca-dog!” I exclaimed. Chewy glanced at me in some confusion, but then grasped the gravity of our situation. Unwilling to release her victim, she firmly planted a kiss on the Stormtrooper’s head and then peeled out of the Death Star with me. By the time we reached the Millennium Falcon, Solo-cat had already engaged the ship’s laser canons, unleashing a deadly salvo on the Stormtroopers at our heels.

“Chooo! Chooo! Chooo!” The lasers kept the Imperial goons at bay while we ascended the ramp. Solo-cat initiated lift-off.

“1! 2! 3!” she counted. Then the engines engaged and we launched into space.

Once clear of the Death Star, Solo-cat handed the controls of the Millennium Falcon over to me, advising me that cats “actually can’t drive spaceships.” She proceeded to make Princess Leah comfortable. Meanwhile, Chewbacca-dog, having dragged a live Stormtrooper onboard during our escape, was attempting to sedate her captive by wrapping him in a blanket and making cooing monkey noises.

Once everyone seemed settled, I switched on the auto-pilot, kicked back, and set a course for dinner time.

“Look Daddy,” she shouted up to me, “I’m walking in your footprints!” A huge smile started in my heart and made its way to my lips.

“That means a lot to me, Sonya,” I responded, glibly wondering how long that metaphorical habit would last.

The following day, after an afternoon of playing in the snow, Sonya, Leena, and I were making our way home. Leena and I were holding hands going up the stairs, following Sonya at the lead. Halfway up, she twisted around to look back with a grin.

“Step in my footprints, Daddy,” she said. “It means that you love me.”

“I will!” I said, looking up to my three year old daughter. “I’m glad that we can walk in each others footprints.”

We first took apart a DVD player somebody was throwing out down the street. While I was able to show the girls how applying battery power to the motors inside it made gears turn, the biggest outcome of that enterprise was my two apprentices repurposing the disc tray as a pretend camera. Sonya laid claim to the internal laser reading portion while Leena, not to be left out, elected to use basically the rest of the DVD player chassis.

“Hold still!” Sonya will say, holding a fragment of a DVD tray up to her face, wires sprouting out from the sides. Beside her, Leena will squeal and peer through a chunk of plastic bigger than her head. *chook!*

With a huge grin, they’ll turn around their pieces of deformed plastic. “Want to see?”

Undeterred, my next attempt involved dissecting a pretty nasty-looking blender a neighbor had set beside their garbage. When I suggested that we bring the appliance home and take it apart, Sonya’s face exploded into a grin.

“I can have my own blender!” she cried, clapping her hands with glee. “I can be makin’ soup!” referring to the fact that Mitali frequently uses a blender to make various soups at home. I looked from her face back to the blender which was caked in a dried, greenish film of, presumably, pureed and rotted food.

“Sure,” I told her. “But first we’ll take it apart to see how it works.”

It’s noteworthy that these kind of executive decisions are only ever made when Mitali isn’t around to veto them. One time walking back from work, I found a bunch of caster wheels (the kind you’d put on the bottom of a TV stand) in a garbage can. Excited, I brought them home and fashioned them into what I considered a rudimentary skateboard. Mitali astutely identified it as the most dangerous object in our house. It was basically a plank of wood studded with nails protruding at odd angles to attach the wheels to the underside. Beyond its questionable construction, the castor wheels permitted the board to slide in any direction, making it the perfect way to maim anyone dumb or naive enough to try standing on it – my 2 year-old daughter for example. It turned out that even a toddler has enough common sense not to go near it. After wiping out on it a couple times, Sonya relegated it to a corner. Mitali then exiled it to the trash can.

In any case, returning home with the blender, I plugged it in to discover that it worked, which made for some great fun. We took the bottom shield off the blender and saw how the electrical plug fed more-or-less directly into the motor coil.

After the blender, we endured a two-week dryspell during which neighbors simply weren’t throwing out any good devices. Fortunately, we woke up one morning to discover that our entire block had lost electricity. While Mitali fished around in cabinets to salvage something for breakfast, I seized on the amazing teaching potential of our situation. I had Sonya try to use various items around the house to see whether they needed electricity. We tested the kitchen lights, the oven, and the toaster, discovering that none of them worked because they needed electricity. Then we tested the faucet and determined that it did *not* need electricity. I pointed out that my mouth and arm still worked as well, so they must not need electricity from the wall either.

Sonya immediately seized on this idea and spent literally the next two days evaluating what kind of power different objects needed. Among her many discoveries, she determined that her shoes, stuffed animal Eeyore, and the zipper on her jacket did not require electricity. She showed me how her board book worked without electricity and how the stairs to our apartment appeared to operate perfectly well without being plugged in. My favorite, however, was the observation she made to me as she laid down for her afternoon nap. As she snuggled down with Kayla, her elephant stuffed animal, her eyes widened with a sudden realization.

“Look Daddy,” she said squeezing the pillow beneath her head. “It doesn’t need electricity!”

Initially, her magnanimity centered around ownership. “Big sister can use this,” she’d chirp as Sonya wrenched a toy out of her hand. Other times, upon opening a new present Leena would immediately announce that she wanted to share this with big sister.

But over time, Leena’s interests in sharing with Sonya have expanded to other areas of her life.

“This is for big sister,” Leena will squeak at the dinner table as Sonya swipes a peach-half off of her plate or takes a long draw out of her sippy-cup.

Other times, Sonya simply reports what Leena has told her. For instance, one afternoon a colorful letter arrived just for Leena during her daily nap. After I informed Sonya that we would open the letter when Leena woke up, she nodded and then cheerfully notified me that Leena had told her “it’s ok. Actually big sister can open it.” When pressed on the point of *when* Leena had said this, Sonya answered “earlier.”

But here’s an interesting fact: for the longest time Leena only spoke when Sonya was around. That all changed in mid July this year. On Sonya’s third birthday, Leena extended her pointer finger at a ballon bobbing in the wind and said “Boon!” I cheered. Mitali cheered. Sonya cheered too – but she could not have possibly anticipated how that word would change things.

With those first words came Leena’s dawning awareness that maybe, just perhaps, she *didn’t* want to do all the things she had been saying all these months. For example, I began noticing that, while she might be squealing “I want to share this with big sister,” a tug of war would ensue, which Leena would inevitably lose and end up keeled over on the floor wondering what just happened. Sonya also began to notice that Leena had lost a certain degree of her former altruism.

To her credit, Sonya adapted well to the harsh realities of a sister who didn’t gleefully fork over her dessert or happily surrender a plastic Wooly Mammoth toy in exchange for a tupperware lid. “It’s Leena’s turn with the block now,” Mitali or I would say. “Your turn is next.” But, really, it was only a matter of time before the “turns” wore thin.

Everything came to a head several weeks ago when Sonya came tearfully running into the kitchen after breakfast and clung onto my leg.

“Leena’s using my backpack, Daddy!” she cried. As if on cue, the smiling two-foot culprit staggered around the corner and into the kitchen dragging an Elmo backpack behind her.

It’s important to note that in the days leading up to this incident, Leena had adopted this backpack as her own child. She slept with this backpack and she ate with this backpack. She toted this backpack around the house and would refuse to leave it behind when going outside, relegating it to drag underneath the stroller while she clutched it by its little red handle.

The only problem was that the backpack actually belonged to Sonya. In Leena’s defense, several days before this impasse, Sonya had received two high-quality backpacks from relatives for her birthday. At that time, Sonya had bequeathed the Elmo backpack to Leena. In soothing tones, I tried to remind Sonya of all this. But she shook her head.

“No, I want *that* backpack!” she curtly responded, folding her arms tightly across her chest and extending her lower lip into a severe pout.

Because a three-year-old has the aggregate reasoning capacity of a box of feral chipmunks, I realized immediately that pressing the point that she had given this backpack to Leena days ago would only hurt my credibility as an impartial judge of the situation. Instead, I appealed to her deep seated conviction that she and Daddy should be identical at all times. I pointed out that Daddy’s backpack was practically identical to her new zebra backpack (they both had zippers and pockets, for example) and the tension of the moment melted away.

Recently, however, this strategy has begun to backfire because my sell jobs have started working on Leena too. This isn’t implicitly a bad thing, of course. It’s just that my efforts to convince Sonya that she actually wants a purple sippy-cup rather than the red one Leena is presently holding now tend to generate an immediate run on purple sippy-cups by all small people in our household.

Most of the time, though, there are enough backpack, sippy-cup, and food stocks on hand to go around. We were in McDonald’s play area recently – one of those multi-level play zones. Leena had just finished eating her chicken nuggets as Sonya climbed to the top tier of the play yard and proceeded to march around shouting, “I need you Leena! I need you Leena!” Leena heard her – she couldn’t articulate it, but she knew what she needed to do. She wriggled out of her seat and started the long, clambering journey up the padded scaffolding towards her big sister.

It turns out that potty-training is when you get your advanced degree in bodily fluids. As far as I can tell, this is for two reasons. First, toddlers make a whole lot more of the stuff. Second, teaching the art of having a bowel movement is pretty much like giving your child a handgun: they don’t know what it is, they will pull it out at random and shoot it, and they have no sense for “collateral damage”. The only real difference is that, when potty training, you can only give positive feedback, lest you shame the child and make them feel badly about taking a shit on your living room rug.

You can imagine how hard this would make handgun training:

“Good job,” you might say,”you only shot that person once!” or “So close! You emptied that magazine directly into a bus. Next time let’s try to wait till we get to the firing range!”

Needless to say, potty training takes some patience. And while I’m definitely onboard with the charade of celebrating when my daughter soaks the bedroom wall in urine, the galling part of the whole endeavor is that the child has no awareness of just how much work they are creating for their parent.

One time, I arrived home from a long, hot walk trucking Sonya and Leena back from the library by stroller. Collapsing into a chair in the mancave, I informed Sonya that I needed a moment alone. She responded by nodding and then unleashing a torrent of urine onto the floor. Mustering all the stamina I had left, I assembled a chipper and supportive response while desperately groping for a cloth to save my mancave from the flood waters.

“Whoops! Did you get that feeling? No problem. I’ll get this cleaned up. Remember to tell me when you need to use the potty!” I knelt down to mop the mess up. A moment later I felt a tug on my sleeve.

“Daddy. I want a piece of cantaloup.”

However, Leena has really taken the art of button pressing to new heights. Notably, she has a finger that is dedicated to pressing things. Presented with anything that looks even remotely like a button, she will sit herself up in front of the item of interest and then her hand will pop out the chubby presser finger swiss army knife-style.

This little finger has an impressive track record.

Not content to brutishly turn off all power to the mancave, one day she padded into my office, circumnavigated my chair, and sat herself down right in front of my computer tower. Her discovery of the quite-subtle Mac Pro power button was announced to me when both of my monitors went blank, followed by the sickening whine of the machine shutting down.

On another occasion, I was sitting on the sofa in the living room working on my laptop when she pulled up beside me, peered around the screen, scanned the keyboard, and (of all 100+ keys present) chose to press the power key.

Other times, Mitali and I, clad in sexy bathing suits will be having an intense polynesian dance-off in front of some tiki huts and then, suddenly, we’ll find ourselves back in our living room, dressed in pajamas, posed ridiculously in front of a blank television; Leena smiling up at us with her finger on the Xbox power button.

And while it might seem annoying that she delinks the Xbox controller, switches off the router, and resets the settings on the scanner, as her father and a computer scientist, I can’t help but be excited for the future that lies ahead of such a young little hacker.

We have three different toy models of the red sports coup that Leena and Sonya drive around the house (Leena remarkably will even make “vroom” noises). Some kids have a blanket, others have a stuffed animal – Sonya cuddles up with a small matchbox car at night. Leena incorporates a Lightning McQueen placemat into her mealtime ritual of launching food onto the floor. Some mornings I will wake up and discover that both of my daughters have disappeared only to be replaced by race cars that are screeching and stomping around the house at 7:15 AM.

So it should come as no surprise that, when I asked Sonya for a photo challenge to complete during my trip to Minneapolis (to complement the photo challenges that I left for my ladies, adorably documented on montrealzen), she immediately responded “with Lightnin’ McQueen, Daddy.”

After some searching, I discovered that there are very few likenesses of the Disney character on the University of Minneapolis campus. So Forest and Leah, dear friends of ours, picked me up from my hotel and made the pilgrimage with me to SuperTarget.

Such places of power are hard to find in Canada. And upon entering the store, I was immediately disoriented by the gravity of the place. Patterned t-shirts, skateboards, loofas, party-sized bags of M&Ms, and counters of digital cameras cried out all at once “Buy me!” However, I held true to the mission and forged my way through to the toy isles.

Founded by babies and toddlers, our McQueen cult is primeval. Lacking the civilized sterility of hymnals, services, and creeds, we draw power from our icons by imitating, holding, and (as seen below) adorning ourselves with our deities.

And were our deity not cast out of metal, we would, no doubt, eat him, too. Since I was at Target, I did the next best thing: bought a bag of M&Ms.

Grappling with what brand of peanut butter to buy, what kind of toothpaste to use, which of the forty different kinds of bread you should toast for breakfast? Wishing that you could return to childhood and go back to a simpler time and place? Think again. The graphic above shows how the number of crayons in a standard Crayola crayon pack has multiplied over time. Today, even toddlers must now contend with daunting decisions when doing something as simple as coloring their favorite Disney Princess’ dress or dinosaur’s claws. While some may view this trend as a direct assault on the innocence and simplicity of childhood, I wonder if these kinds of changes are actually better preparing children for a lifetime of complex (and sometimes meaningless) decision making. Next time we’re confronted with a wall of toothpaste choices, perhaps we should defer to our kids.

• falls down a lot
• has a pony tail
• eats frozen peas before dinner
• cries when he gets hurt
• loves jumping
• likes wearing Monkey pajamas

If you answered “Flynn Rider”, the hero from Tangled, then you’re right! Congratulations! You’re probably asking yourself, “Where did you learn all these details, Derek?” From Flynn Rider himself, actually. That’s right – he lives here with us in Montreal. And I’m not talking about some sort of over-stuffed, furry impostor or plastic bath toy. We have the living breathing legend right here.

He arrived the day after we watched Tangled for the first time. We didn’t hear him come in because we were in the kitchen having lunch. Someone grabbed my arm as I sat eating a sandwich. I turned in my seat to find him peering up at me. He had a pony tail and was wearing a shirt that said “It’s good to be a girl”. He tugged at his crotch with a sense of urgency.

“Flynn Rider poopsin’” he stated.

“You’ve got a poop?” I asked. Flynn Rider smiled.

“Yeah. Change it?”

Since that first bowel movement, Mitali and I have learned so much more about our new friend. At the playground, Flynn Rider loves the slide and climbing on ladders and ropes. No stranger to the perils of adventure, he’s recounted to us some terrible falls and tearful recoveries that involved bandaids and kisses. He can be petulant on occasion, but most of the time really embraces his growing role in our family.

“Flynn Rider push Leena?” Flynn will ask – one hand on the back of Leena’s walker. Leena beams up at me from her seat.

“Sure! Be careful of her legs, though!” And off they go, disappearing around the corner, and into the toy room. I follow them, but by the time I make the turn, Flynn’s headed off and I find Sonya and Leena playing. Sonya has given her a plastic lion which Leena is now voraciously gnawing on. Sonya looks up at me and strokes Leena’s head tenderly.

“Sonya gentle Leena.”

“That’s right, Sonya. I like how gentle you are with Leena. You’re such a good big sister!”

We’ll play for a bit, draw with crayons, talk some stuffed animals. Then Sonya hits on her favorite idea.

“Playground?” Sonya asks.

“Sounds good. Let’s go to the playground.”

“Flynn Rider playground?”

“Absolutely! Flynn Rider goes to the playground as well.”

Usually I take Sonya there. We meet up with her little friends and play in the sand. But sometimes I put on my favorite t-shirt with a big stylized silver robot on the front, and Flynn Rider and Iron Man hold hands down the stairs and across the street as they make their way to the park.